In a survey conducted by Mzinga & Babson Executive Education it was revealed that of the businesses adopting and incorporating social media into their marketing mix only a mere 16% are in fact measuring the ROI from the said social media activity.

This very low figure is no surprise. After all given the varying degrees of expected returns it can be very difficult to accurately measure the success rate of social media.

With all the different types of social media; blogs, Facebook, viral emails, etc and the different returns each can offer, along with a company’s own desired return, things can get a bit complicated. The best course of action when approaching any social media campaign is to plan and establish specific expected ROI’s. For example:

• Increase traffic to website
• Increase business contacts
• Get people talking about the brand
• Have people saying positive things about the brand

Traffic

Measuring the audience of your social media campaign or the level of traffic being directed from a particular social media activity is perhaps one of the easiest aspects to measure.

Any standard analytic tool should be able to show the following:

• Unique visitors
• Page views per visitor
• Time spent on site
• Frequency of visit
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rates

…letting you see where your traffic has came from (Facebook, Bebo, corporate blog…), if they are engaging with the website (how high is the bounce rate, are they spending a long time are they returning, etc), and whether the traffic is being converted (are they emailing you, are they going to the contacts page, etc).

Blogging platforms (such as WordPress) social networks and email marketing software, will also provide you with some form of analytic’s allowing you to see how many people have been exposed to that particular piece of social media.

The value of such quantitative results is of course high, however, it only provides a small snapshot of the full return any social media campaign will offer and provides a starting point for discovering the true ROI of your social media campaign.

Measuring Interaction

Knowing the levels of traffic may be very interesting, however, it doesn’t give much substance. The beauty of social media is that it gets people talking to one another and if you are investing in social media you want to know how well your target market is interacting with your brand on all these various platforms.

Measuring how users interact with your brand can be done in various ways; the most basic, albeit time consuming, way is to simply keep your eyes and ears open.

Of course an indication of the level of interaction on the blog can be established from the number and quality of comments being left- this also applies to social media profiles such as Facebook and similarly a quick search on Twitter will reveal all the various conversations where your brand is mentioned. Twittbeep is a handy tools that alerts you of any mentions of your brand and/or profile within Twitter.

Who is talking about you & what are they saying

Once again this is a case of keeping your ear to the ground.

Using alert tools to view mentions of your brand is an effective way to monitor who is talking about your brand and it gives you the opportunity to respond. Google Alerts is one of the most popular, and free, alert tools available.

In terms of measuring who is talking about you and what they are saying the potential returns are increased brand awareness within your target market and the development of a dialogue with potential or existing customers, a potential by-product is the identification of any issues which may affect company reputation.

Benchmarking your social media campaign is the best method of measuring results. Developing a set of questions relating to the specific returns you expect and then performing a monthly audit willreveal how successful the social media campaign has been in terms of not only quantity but also quality.

Quality over Quantity

Many people tend to be weary of qualitative measurement as opposed to quantitative. Quantitative research produces nice safe numbers that appear to be more trustworthy and reliable, however, people do not know the quality of these nice safe numbers. The phrase “quality over quantity” is very, very true, especially in terms of measuring a social media campaign- or any form of marketing campaign for that matter. Tables and graphs telling you how much traffic has landed on your website from Facebook, Bebo and MySpace can mean nothing; knowing what your audience is saying about your brand and how they are interacting with your brand is without a doubt far more valuable.

So when approaching any social media campaign do not become complacent when measuring- although it appears that around 84% of businesses don’t measure at all anyway! Ensure that along with looking at the figures you perform serious analysis on the quality of the traffic and level of interaction.

Are you interacting with the right market? What are people saying about you, are they saying anything at all about you? If you don’t know the answer to these questions then you don’t know the true return on your social media campaign.